Arkansas Blog

Mike Huckabee said what?

Florida resident Mike Huckabee's penchant for the rhetorical overreach is familiar by now, but attention to his mockery of the difficult issue of transgender people (he channeled Porky's by joking about wishing he could have claimed to be a woman as a teen to shower with girls) provided an occasion for many on the web to remember some of his other bodacious applause lines.

Here, on Bustle, for example: is a recitation of four more "wildly offensive" things he's said. Only four? That's just a warmup. This list includes the serious and the silly: His disbelief in U.S. Supreme Court judicial supremacy; his comparison of abortion with the Holocaust; quarantining of AIDS sufferers; and "icky" gay people.

What? No "Uncle Sugar" and his birth control pills for wildly libidinous women? No putdowns of New Yorkers? No talk of his unhappiness about dirty-mouthed New York women? And on and on.

Huckabee's reach for the applause line is looked at askance all over the web, including by some mainstream media people who've been over the years too ready to give Huckabee a pass. His effort to break from the pack this election cycle seems to have led to even more overheated Huck humor than is customary, and it was already a lot.

That might be bad for him. But not necessarily.

This IS the Republican primary he's currently focusing on. What if Huckabee is right? What if hate, distrust , envy and the "ick factor" can be marshaled with sophomoric humor, exaggeration, illogic and misrepresentation into a winning campaign?

That the Human Rights Campaign scores him for a "bizarre rant" on transgender issues may help more than it hurts in the coming SEC Primary. Legal discrimination is, after all, the law of Arkansas and the preference of elected politicians from Gov. Asa Hutchinson on down. Huckabee probably cheers disapproval from such quarters.